Oct 18, 2014

Yesterday, Google finally debuted the highly anticipated Nexus 9 tablet, which turned out to be a pretty interesting device especially for two reasons.

The tablet is the first device of its kind to arrive with Android 5.0 Lollipop and it’s also the first Nexus product to take advantage of a 64-bit processor. The chip inside is actually an NVIDIA Tegra K1, a dual-core processor with two large NVIDIA Denver CPU cores plus Kepler GPU with 192 shader cores.

The Nexus 9 is the third Tegra K1 tablet

The Tegra K1 platform hasn’t made an appearance in that many tablets so far, and except the Xiaomi MiPad and NVIDIA Shield Tablet, this is the third product to bundle the architecture. Last month at IFA 2014, we managed to track down the first two Chromebooks with Tegra K1, which proved to deliver apt levels of performance. But how will the Tegra K1 deliver in tablets? Well, the folks over at PhoneArena have managed to get ahold of the first benchmark scores having the Nexus 9 at their core. The results were produced using the Geekbench, CPU and memory-testing app. Note that graphics performance was not tested in this session. The outcome of the tests is quite spectacular, as the Nexus 9 with Denver chip burns through the completion, surpassing with ease every major Android device including the high-end Samsung Galaxy Note 4, which runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chip and Sony Xperia Z3 with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 801.

Nexus 9 surpasses the iPhone 6 performance-wise

What’s more, the Nexus 9 chip manages to top the Apple A8 chip inside the iPhone and iPhone Plus too. And we’d probably get the same results if we slipped in the recently unveiled iPad Air 2. However, we should highlight one interesting aspect. The benchmarks reveal the Tegra K1 running at a clock speed of 2.5GHz, but Google announced the Nexus 9 coming with a 2.3GHz clock speed instead. This might be an error on behalf of Google or just an indication you should take these preliminary results with a grain of salt. Google intents to market the new tablet with a focus on productivity, that’s why having an ultra-speedy processor on the inside will certainly help the Nexus’ cause when it comes to the market.

The tablet arrives with an 8.9-inch display with 2047 x 1535 pixel resolution and 4:3 display ratio. Google also bundled the slate with 2GB of RAM and either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage. Sadly, the tech giant fails to offer more spacious storage solutions. But hey, nothing is perfect in the world.